Is there no alternative to Outlook?

First of all I must show off a little. I’m free again! Yeah, I’ve ditched my O365 subscription and moved to outlook.com. I’ve decided that paying 6$ for mailbox when you’re not using it for business is simply a waste. So far I’m happy, there are some things I’m missing. But there also are things which are better, like:

• Categories - yeah they’re working far better in free version
• IM - as I’ve written before Lync is not very usable if most of your contacts is not using it; IM in outlook.com however has full integration with Facebook, Google and Skype; yes, you can chat with whoever you want
• Integration with social networks - works perfectly, not to mention ability to watch YouTube videos directly in the message

Calendar is a little bit clumsy, but I can live with it.

I thought that I would be missing Office desktop apps, but no. Well, almost. OneNote was quite brilliant, but actually its only advantage over Evernote is this screen grabbing functionality. Evernote however has some handy web clipper plugin, so it’s not so bad.

What I’m really missing is Outlook. It was just perfect. I was able to really organize myself with it. Everything was working smoothly. Now I’m using Windows Live Mail and as it’s not so bad as email client. It really sucks for calendar. Well, you can see all your current events on right pane, just like in Outlook. But it has no reminders! Or at least I’m not able to find them in settings. This simply makes it unusable for calendar, as I have to track all events by myself. I won’t be reminded about them. Luckily I have my calendar synced with my phone, so I’m getting reminders at least there.

And here is another thing. When I was thinking about switching to outlook.com I was afraid most that I would have to use this terrible app on my Android phone. But it has Exchange ActiveSync support, so it’s not a problem to use regular Android email client for it. It syncs everything except SMSes. Unfortunately Windows Live Mail isn’t using Exchange ActiveSync, or again I’ve screwed something in the setup. So my messages are not synced immediately, but every given amount of time. I really don’t like it, it feels like in old days.

Categories are also not supported by Windows Live Mail what makes them quite unusable. I’ve tested also Postbox and eM Client, but first lacks calendar support and second one isn’t supporting it for outlook.com.

Right now it really looks that there is no alternative to Outlook if you want to use Microsoft email service. eM Client is close to what I need, but they still have to add support for outlook.com. Waiting.